Famine has been conventionally associated with Africa, and portrayed visually through stereotypes. As in recent media coverage of the crisis in East Africa, photographs of starving children with fly-blown faces, removed from their context, remain common.

Dr Dave Clark, working as a multimedia journalist for China Daily, set out this summer to do something different. Focusing on the larger issue of food insecurity in Asia, he photographed, filmed and produced a six-part video series to provide a more complex story. Shooting in Nepal, Bangladesh and China, Clark explored the impact of population growth, urban growth, changing tastes and biotechnology. You can see all of the videos (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) on his Vimeo site.

This video series saw Clark put into practice many of the questions he had research in his PhD thesis, Representing the Majority World. Uppermost in his mind was the desire to avoid traditional famine imagery, even though – as in the photograph above – circumstances in Nepal offered him the chance to easily replicate the stereotypes.

Working with local journalists to find how food insecurity manifested itself in daily life, Clark has presented a rich account of food insecurity. Although he believes this series is far from perfect, Clark has nonetheless shown how different stories are possible.

Photo: Dolpa, Nepal, April 2011. Copyright Dave Clark.

• Stereotypes that Move: in a forthcoming essay on the iconography of famine (which prompted my earlier post on famine photographs and the need for careful critique, and is attached to this post on stereotypes) I have examined the portraits of atrocity that represented the 2002 Malawi famine and which later circulated in charity appeals and the 2005 Live 8 campaign, especially the photographs of a young boy called Luke Piri taken by The Daily Mirror‘s staff photographer Mike Moore. The easy conclusion of this analysis is that famine iconography should be roundly condemned as simplistic, reductionist, colonial and even racist. But before we are satisfied with this comprehensive rebuke we have to ask three difficult questions. First, would we be better off without these photographs altogether? Second, if we want to dispense with the negative, what is the alternative that should take its place if, as I’ve argued earlier, we don’t want to fall into the trap of prompting an equally simplistic ‘positive’ image? And third, what happens if the iconography of famine is politically necessary in certain contexts?

• The Photography of Suffering as ‘Pornography’? What does it mean to use this term so frequently in relation to so many different situations? What are the conditions supposedly signified by ‘pornography’? Might this singular term obscure more than it reveals?

• The Starving Child as a Symbolic Marker: Contemporary news photographs are chosen less for their descriptive function and more for their capacity to provide symbolic markers to familiar interpretations and conventional narratives, as one image of a malnourished child shows.

• Famine Iconography as a Sign of Failure: Prompted by the East African crisis, this post argues we can easily lament the limitations of famine iconography, especially the way it homogenises, anthropomorphises, infantilises and impoverishes. But above all else we have to understand it is a visual sign of failure. The recourse to the stereotypes of famine is driven by the complex political circumstances photography has historically been unable to capture. This means that when we see the images of distressed people, feeding clinics and starving babies, we are seeing the end result of a collective inability to picture causes and context. This argument prompted a considerable debate, which I discussed here and here.

In contrast to the reiteration of stereotypes – even though they can be politically necessary in certain contexts – its important to consider what the new visuals of ‘Africa’ might be, something I broached in a post of that name last June.

The UK National Archives maintains a series of Flickr galleries, helpfully putting many of its images into the public domain for easy access and use. Amongst them are photographs from the Colonial Office archives covering a number of African countries, on a page entitled “Africa Through a Lens“.

An interesting feature of the Colonial Office collections is that many of the images do not have captions or contextual information, and by posting them on Flickr, the National Archive is hoping that viewers will be able to provide some of the missing information.

The Guardian has a story on the National Archives Africa images here.

Photo: CO1069-2-21.

UK aid being unloaded and distributed in Haiti from the Royal Fleet Auxillary ship Largs Bay. Photo: DFID.

On 11 January BBC Radio 4 ran a documentary entitled “Haiti and the truth about NGO’s”. The BBC’s description of the programme is pasted here:

A year after the earthquake, Edward Stourton returns to Haiti to look at problems in the aid industry. How far has the way we help gone bad?

Aid workers have already baptised the earthquake in Haiti a “historical disaster”. But despite more than an estimated 10,000 relief agencies flooding the country in the wake of the emergency, the rescue operation has become notorious for the slowness with which aid reached the victims.

More than one million people are marking the anniversary of the quake still living in refugee camps. How can that be when Haiti has attracted billions of dollars in donations and aid pledges?

Critics say foreign aid groups were out of control – that they failed to coordinate and were therefore ineffective; that they swamped some areas leaving others untouched. One NGO evaluation described a ‘wild west’ situation.

In Haiti, Edward talks to UN officials responsible for coordinating the humanitarian response, to local aid watchdogs about how aid is failing to meet needs, and to Haitian grassroots NGOs about a different way to deliver help where and how it is needed.

Is what has happened in Haiti symptomatic of a wider crisis of humanitarianism?

Insiders say many aid agencies have been compromised by business imperatives and increasing political ties. Inside the sector there is growing concern about previously taboo issues of aid corruption and abuse, and ways to improve weak accountability and deliver relief that local people really want.

An insight into the aid industry as it faces challenging times.

On AlertNet, John Mitchell wrote:

Edward Stourton’s BBC Radio 4 documentary, ‘Haiti and the Truth about NGOs’ aired yesterday, went for the jugular. In the spirit of several polemic criticisms of aid agencies from Willam Shawcross’s Quality of Mercy, Graham Hancock’s Lords of Poverty through to the Linda Polman’s War Games, the documentary cited specific examples of incompetency, ineffectiveness, moral corruptness and waste. It seemed to me that Stourton was persuading the listener the humanitarian system, in Haiti and by implication elsewhere, is a system that has lost its moral compass and is tired if not completely broken.

All of us who have worked in relief situations will recognise many of the anecdotal stories upon which Stourton’s narrative is based and it is particularly worrying that some of the weaknesses that emerged have been identified time and time again in evaluation reports. But is the humanitarian system really that corrupt and dysfunctional?

I think not.

You can listen to a recording of the radio documentary here:

[display_podcast]

Ever wondered if the stereotypes of famine are a thing of the past? Ever thought that surely now, in 2010, no one takes images of fly blown children anymore? Then think about this image and its caption, from Boston.com’s Big Picture review of the year’s photographs.

UPDATE 20/12/10:

Shortly after posting this, Charlie Beckett alerted me to this video example from Save the Children. It was published in July this year:

Stefán Einarsson, from Reykjavík, Iceland won the competition with this poster “We are still waiting”, calls on world leaders to live up to their promises of ending poverty by 2015.

Twenty-nine other works were also chosen as finalists, and Einarsson had another two posters amongst those. Each deployed the stereotypical child and disturbing ways, indicating the continuing power of this iconography.

Unsurprisingly, the manipulated image of President Obama as the stereotypical child has become controversial.

Life Without Lights from Peter DiCampo on Vimeo.

Year-round in Ghana, the sun sets at 6pm and rises at 6am – thus, the residents of communities lacking electricity live half of their lives in the dark. Over ten years ago, the government of Ghana began a massive campaign to provide the country’s rural north with electricity, but the project ceased almost immediately after it began. The work sluggishly resumes during election years, as candidates attempt to garner popularity and votes. But at present, an estimated 73% of villages remain without electricity in the neglected north – an area comprising 40% of the country.

The thesis investigates how photographic illustrations of Africa play a role in constructing knowledge of the continent for mainstream UK audiences. It undertakes this in terms of the ‘Minority World’ and the ‘Majority World’ in order to challenge the assumptions of superiority and inferiority associated with traditional representations of ‘First World/Third World’ or ‘developed/underdeveloped’. Central to the discussion is the notion of a specific photographic point of view based on the author’s background as a Minority World photographer who has undertaken extensive work in the Majority World.

The thesis considers how historical photographic representations of African countries that are beyond the personal experience of UK mainstream audiences, and the formation of key compositions in a particular style to represent famine, were repeated through the last century and how these compositions relate to current public understandings of the Majority World as a particular place. Through this discussion the thesis critically analyses public consumption of such images and argues the construction of key events (disasters, famines, etc.) are central to the imaginary construction of the continent of Africa. It argues that colonial relations of power and knowledge, and the production of ‘otherness’ continue to influence contemporary images of the Majority World. Taking the 1984-5 Ethiopian famine as a key event in the formation of geographic visualisations of the African continent, the thesis both considers this event in detail and traces its influence to the formation of contemporary photographic illustrations. Through critical discourse analysis, extensive interviews with photographers, fieldwork, and surveys the thesis examines contemporary photojournalistic coverage of a single event and how it affects UK public understandings of Africa.

The photojournalistic representations of famine in Africa are then considered in terms of the rapidly changing global image economy (in which the move to digital production and distribution is transforming photographic practice), the rise of local photographers, and the influence of the visual discourses on economic stability and growth of the communities in which their subjects live. These arguments come together in the 2003 case of photographic reports from Bob Geldof’s return to Ethiopia during another purported food crisis.

The thesis asks if the changes in the image economy and recent examples of new photographic practice, especially that which follows the codes of conduct for imagery put in place after the Ethiopian famine of 1984-5, demonstrate the potential for changing the way ‘Africa’ is constructed as an imagined geography for UK publics, and, if so, how? It grounds the argument in an extended conclusion, which examines the assignment the author carried out in Mali in November 2005 in conjunction with Oxfam GB. This photographic commission demonstrated the difficulty of finding an alternative visualisation of food insecurity (famine) that meets the demands of non-government organisations’ (NGOs) ethical picture policies yet satisfies the requirements of mainstream media in the UK.

You can download the Thesis at http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/136/

He explains the context:

We’ve all seen it: the photo of a teary-eyed African child, dressed in rags, smothered in flies, with a look of desperation that the caption all too readily points out.  Some organization has made a poster that tells you about the realities of poverty, what they are doing about it, and how your donation will change things.

I reacted very strongly to these kinds of photos when I returned from Africa in 2008.  I compared these photos to my own memories of Malawian friends and felt lied to.  How had these photos failed so spectacularly to capture the intelligence, the laughter, the resilience, and the capabilities of so many incredible people?

And he outlines his approach:

I am taking two photos of the same person; one photo with the typical symbols of poverty (dejected look, ripped clothes, etc.), and another of this person looking their very finest, to show how an image can be carefully constructed to present the same person in very different ways.  I want to bring to light some of the different assumptions we make about a person, especially when we see an image of “poverty” from rural Africa.  So far, I have finished two sets in the series and I want to share them with you to get reactions and hopefully generate some discussion around this in the early stages of this project.

As one of the commenters on McNichol’s blog noted, we have to recognise that both the images of poverty and relative prosperity in this project are ‘staged’. We might also want to ask whether this contrast is simply replicating the simple negative vs. positive frame for understanding images that in the end doesn’t escape the power of stereotypes. However, the contrast between the two constructions is still something worth thinking about.